Rambling, rumbling, rumination

TEShots: Minecraft Edition

I’m doing a new Thing here. OK, it’s something I’ve already done, but now I’m calling it TEShots. (For now, anyway.) I take a LOT of photographs of the world around me, and every once in a while, I feel like sharing. Today, it’s the Minecraft Edition.

We’re excavating a smallish pit on the back of our house, so we can make the existing window into a proper bedroom window, so we can remodel/finish the basement and squeeze in another bedroom. It’s actually something that’s bugged me since we bought this house; there’s no proper escape from the basement in the case of fire. Ah, the building code of the late 70s. Anyway, to save $2000, we had the concrete cutter people cut a chunk out of our back porch, and I’m digging out the new window well so they can come back and cut out the window space.

It turns out that excavation is way easier in Minecraft than in real life. Weird, huh?

Big Rock, Small Pit

Yes, that’s a 100-pound rock I pulled out, and the one still in the pit wound up being over 200 pounds. I had to get help for that one, since it turns out that hitting it with my fist didn’t break it into small blocks.

The crazy thing is that those rocks, though the biggest ones I’ve had to deal with, were hardly the only rocks. By weight, I’ve pulled probably about a literal ton of rock out of that hole, and I’m not even done yet. My father-in-law helped with the top layer of busted concrete and the top layer of obvious rocks, and my brother and his friend helped with that biggest beast of a rock, but there has been plenty for me to do in between. There was a bit of soil and clay in there, too, but the ground here in the Rocky Mountains is, well… rocky. It’s also fairly compact. Speaking of volume, I’ll probably have pulled out the equivalent of two of these trailers… which sure seems like a lot more than should be in that hole to a depth of 5 feet.

Trailer o’ Fun

Apologies for not getting more shots of the project in progress. In the meantime, here’s a photo of where the rocks wound up. It took that bulldozer two pushes to get our load on the pile. Less than a minute for weeks of work to be just another part of the crowd.

Assimilated

Yeah, we have rocks here. Lots of rocks. I’m just glad my father-in-law is letting us use his trailer. This would have been even more of a project without it. Yay for summertime house projects, hm?

Trick is, I’m not even sure who that person is or how to find them. I did suspect something to that effect, and it does seem a shame to just toss good rocks in the dump, but we didn’t really have the luxury of just posting a want ad or something and wait around.

Still… you’re right, probably should have looked a bit more into that.

I *think* she appreciates it. If nothing else, it’s nice to get in something that feels like *real* work after making digital art stuffs all day. Yes, what I do is actually work, but sometimes it’s hard to convince this mortal frame of that.

That little white framed two-pane “window” in the first photo used to look out on a very small window well with a corrugated metal retaining wall. It was about three feet wide and 1.5 feet deep. The kids could probably have gotten out of it (though they couldn’t have safely lifted the metal grate out of the way), but no normal adults could have.

Actually, it was my brother and his friend that moved the biggest rock. I tried a few times but just don’t have the strength, and I can’t quite muster up a Hulk out moment to handle it. It took *them* three tries, and I kept telling them that I’d sub in for one of them. They got it in the end, very thankfully uninjured. I did help move it into the wheelbarrow and the trailer, but those were short lifts. They did the hard part in not just lifting it, but lifting it to shoulder height and shoving it over the side of the pit. That was the tricky part, getting the angles and shifting muscle groups as it went higher. I handled the 100 pound rock on my own, and that was tough enough, taking three tries also. I’m no weightlifter, just a deck jockey artist/designer who loves volleyball.

…and yeah, let’s call that a sash. I’m not sure a cummerbund would be quite *proper* for a fellow winking and sticking out his tongue. 🙂